5 Common Business Mistakes Entrepreneurs Make & How to Avoid Them

As I've been digging deep into what sets successful entrepreneurs apart from those that struggle, I've come up with a few ideas / strongholds / paradigms that we should all beware of...

From two decades of experience...here's a list that I hope helps you uncover some of the most common business mistakes entrepreneurs make.

5 Common Business Mistakes

1. Continuous Partial Attention

The reality is that modern technology offers us fool's gold. It promised us efficiency but gave us distraction. Studies show that being distracted by modern technology is akin to showing up to work drunk. Before we know it, we get addicted to the adrenaline of multitasking, not recognizing the harm. We need to be able to focus for longer than 30 seconds to solve problems that will build ongoing wealth and health for us. A key way to do this is to start using a concept Founder’s Fire master coaches call anchor activities. These are blocks of time that occur daily, weekly, or monthly on regular intervals that do not get moved. Thus the name anchor! They are big, heavy, and important. And the commitment that you make is that unless there's blood or smoke, I'm doing that activity. Period. That discipline and focus start to echo throughout the rest of your business and your life. If you want to get off the treadmill of always trying to do more… start doing less, but do it better.

2. Getting the Right People on the Bus

This good-hearted but terrible idea always results in the same thing: the pressure to try to assign someone something that fits their personality or skill set. You like them, and they are good people. But you don't have a place for them, so instead of growing your business, you shift your focus to building a job for them. Good leaders never focus on getting the right people on the bus. Instead, they focus on the customer. Then they ask themselves based on the perfect customer journey for my products or services, what roles are required to fulfill this promise? Now they know the seats on the bus. Next, they go and begin to audition people for those seats so that the business can function as a mature entity, not a dysfunctional family trying to keep uncle Bob happy.

3. Shifting the Business Model to Meet Short Term Opportunity

Having coached business owners and entrepreneurs for more than two decades, I have seen this one consistently cause problems. The scenario goes like this: you are in business and doing well, but hitting a lull. But then there is an opportunity that doesn’t really fit your business model — but —that you could take advantage of. You then start re-organizing the business and its operations to focus on this new opportunity. Inevitably the new opportunity either works once or doesn't work at all. After this exercise and chasing and futility, you realize that if you had spent those weeks and months focused on your core competencies, you could've improved and grown. Instead, you wasted time chasing. You've followed the siren song of opportunity. Instead of having a vision of success in a generic sense, you need to focus on an assignment or maybe it's better thought of as a territory that you were continually gaining ground in. Strategic alignment means focusing all your efforts towards a clear goal where you are flexible about the technique, but committed to the outcome.

4. Not Raising Prices

Some owners think that their job is to make their customers happy. That's not correct. The job is to meet their needs in a way that provides value both relationally and transactionally. Unfortunately, many business owners think that by not raising prices they're doing their customers a favor. And while this is understandable, the math just doesn't work out. As minimum wages go up and inflation goes up the cost of living goes up. We have to position our business so that it matches these changes. If we keep our prices abnormally low and don't have a consistent plan for price strategy then we communicate the wrong things and we miss out on several things. The first thing that we communicate is that we don't understand business. Oops! This is best illustrated by what I call flea market pricing. Let me explain. If you offer your products or services at an even dollar amount that makes a lot of sense. $10 for this, $50 for that, $150 for this.

However, big business has taught consumers to see pricing as a part of brand status. Even numbers are then seen as flea market pricing because the reason for the price is because it's easy to add up on the spot at a flea market. But "real businesses" prices are $9.99, $19.99, $199 etc.

In the first case, the price format itself is communicating a lack of sophistication and likely a lack of quality. In the second case, it's communicating a degree of acumen and sophistication. Now is that true that products which cost $20 actually have less quality than products that are $19.99?

Of course they don't.

But in many cases, perception is reality until more information is available. You don't want your customers or potential customers looking at your prices and making a snap judgment that you're not sophisticated or that you don't understand business and you belong in a flea market. Raise prices consistently and throw the 99 on there.

5. Doing Nothing and Waiting for Things to Change

Now, of course, this one sounds obvious but so many business owners have a very sneaky way of doing nothing. It's called busy work. If we stay distracted with all those items that can easily weigh us down, we don't think about the big picture and then in a sense were kind of like the ostrich with our head in the sand. We can all just justify how those details are so important but in reality, they're taking us out of the captains chair and no one is navigating the ship. When things build up and burst and there's a rupture, then we have to go into crisis mode that sends us into high energy output, high emotional output. Having met our ego needs to feel vital and save the day. We now now need to recover. And we rest by burying ourselves back in the details. Now the cycle starts all over again. But it doesn't have to be this way. The seesaw of urgent to docile is solved by consistently applying the idea mentioned above: anchor activities. Make a plan and stick to it 90% of the time. When you have to divert from your plan, do so consciously not reactively.

So those are the five worst business mistakes that people often get stuck in and I hope this article helps you avoid these traps and set you on a path to freedom and focus!

Any questions you may have about these strategies, please reach out so we can lend a hand.

Best,

Eric and the Founder's Fire Team